Delhi swindler Vijay Kumar of JVG held in Punjab

Mansa, June 3 -- Inter-state swindler Vijay Kumar of Delhi, who made property worth more than Rs. 1,000 crore by illegal means, was arrested on Sunday. He had been absconding for almost 10 years. Proclaimed offender (PO) since 2003, he was arrested in Delhi on May 14. He is wanted in almost a dozen cases registered in different states, including Punjab, where between 1988 and 1998, his JVG finance company duped people on the pretext of tripling their investment in three years and, in another ponzi scheme, promised them an unrealistic 33% return.

The Delhi high court had attached his property after calculating it to be worth Rs. 1,000 crore. The company would shut its offices in major cities overnight virtually and run away with the investors' money. In 1997, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) banned the company. The accused was a private contractor in Ghaziabad from 1980 to 1988.

In March 1999, on the complaint of Pawan Kumar of Mansa, who had invested almost Rs. 2.3 lakh in JVG, the police registered a case against Vijay, Bhupinder Singh of Sangrur and Khushal Singh of Patiala. Bhupinder and Khushal got three-year rigorous imprisonment each along with a fine of Rs. 10,000 each but Vijay dodged the police.

A Mansa police team led by station house officer Harpal Singh on Sunday brought him over on production warrant from Delhi and a court here remanded him in police custody for five days.

With the swindle money, Vijay had built residential colonies in Haridwar, Bhagwat, Patna and Hyderabad; bought 240 acres at Dharuheda village in Gurgaon jurisdiction, and raised 20 departmental stores in Chandigarh, Kurukshetra, Banaras, Patna, Ranchi and New Delhi. He runs a newspaper, "Daily Hindi Times" in New Delhi, manufactures detergent powder and cakes under brand name Avtar, and makes Airlines provisioning licence.